I began this series four years and a month ago, when my brothers and I gathered briefly in Oregon for time together before my move from the Pacific Coast all the way over to Amsterdam for work. I’m feeling a bit nostalgic – perhaps even a tad homesick – for the Pacific, even as I enjoy the Mediterranean and North Sea coastlines I’ve visited more recently :-).
Last bridge pics from my lovely Centovalli afternoon trip down from Locarno last year. Interestingly, I saw these hills and lakes from the air en route to Rome from Amsterdam, two Sundays ago: look for it in upcoming posts :-).
These little guys were in that same lovely Chiang Mai temple complex as my most recent “orchids” post :-). (Tap the images to see uncropped versions.) And yeah, that was a work trip too. No wonder my poor body and brain sometimes get a bit confused and feel their age lol.
As with the Barcelona photos I’ve been showing you: couple days of work from Sunday to Wednesday last week, but one does have evenings and mornings for walks and enjoying wonders of the world :-). Hadn’t been to Rome since, wait for it, May 1981. Yikes.
With this post, we’re wrapping up our remaining photos of Trondheim, which is the largest city but not the capital of Norway’s Trondelag county. An interesting perception shift that came about over the course of this journey was that cities I used to think of as very far north (e.g. Trondheim, or even Bergen) I now think of as, by Norwegian standards, not really all that far north in fact. After all, they’re still below the arctic circle lol… 🙂
Above, Queen Matilda of Flanders, who is of an older generation and different from the Empress Maud of the Anarchy so well chronicled in the Cadfael series. Interesting, the succession challenges that even a royal system can bring. Human ego, I guess, eh? Last shots from my stroll around the Jardins du Luxembourg, final morning in Paris before heading off to Zermatt last October.
Our plane flew over Lago di Brecciano shortly before landing at Rome’s Fiumicino airport on Sunday afternoon. Another short work trip in a lovely and ancient city near the Mediterranean.
This is only the sixth post we’ve shown you from Tromsø, where my photo time-stamps tell me our boat pulled in right around 2:30PM on the 24th of January. The center circle photo above, and the panorama below, were taken just before Gary & I began our roughly two-hour stroll through the lingering mid-afternoon dusk to dark of the city at that time of year. Since many of you fabulous readers are in locations where it’s now getting hotter by the day, I figured a reminder of cool winter evening-afternoons might be welcome :-).
Last shots from our roughly one-hour port call at Svolvaer, “capital of the Lofoten Islands,” where we were on the ground from about 9:30 to about 10:30pm on the 23rd of January. I hope, one day, to go back for a longer stay at this time of year when the days are as long as the nights were, back in January :-).
Admit it: “that’s the Netherlands!” is not the first phrase that springs to mind when you look at the image above? Yet indeed it is; more in this post from remarkable Vlieland and its lovely lighthouse from both below and up top.
More from the Barcelona waterfront. In the space of one week, I made it from Vlieland off the northern coast of NL (for pleasure) to the Mediterranean coast (for work, but one still has one’s morning & evening walks before & after the work day).
(so much world, so little time....) 